What do you think about Session as a potential replacement for Signal?
Especially for the less tech-savvy among us?
https://getsession.org/Open linkView original on lemmy.mlhttps://getsession.org/Open linkView original on lemmy.mlhttps://getsession.org/Open linkView original on lemmy.ml
Dear god, just don't.
https://soatok.blog/2025/01/14/dont-use-session-signal-fork/
As soon as I saw the furry reaction images, I knew this was going to be a detailed and informative blog post.
By the same author about Signal
Wasn’t this the blog who also got a response from session asking for a PoC and then they replied with (paraphrasing) “well it’s not my job to provide one”?
So everything in that blog post is theoretical at best?
Really bad idea, session copied signal, stripped out forward secrecy, and uses centralized file transfer servers.
https://eylenburg.github.io/im_comparison.htm
This link has a helpful graphic, thank you! 🙂👍
firstly , why do you want to replace Signal?
A bigger weak point is having weak encryption like Session has. Also, you cannot obtain metadata from Signal. They've gone to great length to prevent that. Signal servers don't even know who is talking to whom.
That's a pretty big claim to make with zero additional information.
Since 2018, Signal has been encrypting the sender data with a key that isn't known to the server. Messages do not contain unencrypted metadata. I'm not sure how you expect the FBI to do this with the information available to the Signal servers.
No, they literally cannot. The entire protocol is open sourced and has been audited many times over.
One of the fundamental things you assume when designing a cryptosystem is that the communication link between two parties is monitored. The server mostly exists as a tool to frustrate efforts by attackers that have network dominance (i.e. secret police in oppressive regimes) by not allowing signals intelligence to extract a social graph. All this hypothetical attacker can see is that everyone talks to a server so they can't know which two people are communicating.
The previous iteration, TextSecure, used SMS. Your cellular provider could easily know WHO you were talking to and WHEN each message was sent. So SMS was replaced with a server and the protocol was amended so that even the server has no way of gaining access to that information.
The sealed sender feature is something that the client does. It was best effort because, at the time, they still supported older clients and needed backwards compatibility. This is no longer the case.
If this is a question that you need answered then I'm
notsure you're qualified to declare that Signal is insecure.Because his grandma can't type a password 30 characters long just to restore her messages.
They are so smart and still make some choices that are so, so, *so dumb*. 'No history on a new PC for you, it's a ״feature״'. Seriously? c'mon.
History isn't stored on the server so it can't be automatically populated on a new device. That is a feature. The alternative, storing the messages on the server or having the means for one device to clone all of its messages to another device, would be insecure.
A 30 character long password is required in order to have enough bits of entropy so that the backed up messages are actually secure.
Grandma isn't moving her data to a new PC without assistance, the person that is assisting her should be competent enough to operate Signal.
Sure, so let me export my data from another PC or phone. If they wanted you to have message history, they would. So I'll respectfully disagree.
Why can she do WhatsApp but no Signal?
It's already needing to convince people to use Signal, why also making it hard for, let's say, your grandma.
https://signal.miraheze.org/wiki/How_to_move_Signal_Desktop_message_history_to_another_computer_(or_during_an_OS_reinstall)
I use Matrix and this is possible via several encryption keys. They just probably cba. How Matrix E2EE works
The real alternative to Signal for myself is SimpleX. The project is still in his beginning but it's the best instant messaging we could have once polished finished
As a centralized system, nothing has been shown to improve on Signal yet. For decentralized systems, I haven’t seen anything better than Matrix yet? SimpleX is slightly more secure, but harder to spin up and easier to break.
Session… there have been multiple articles written on how it is flawed and untrustworthy.
Matrix is not decentralized but rather federated and distributed. Also synapse (matrix sevrer) have poor performance, especially when you federate your instance to others.
What do you mean poor performance ?
My synapse used to run on a 5€/mo VPS besides other stuff and ran fine and now runs on one of my on-premise servers (and not even my fastest, just some old ryzen 2700) with A BUNCH of other stuff besides it. Multiple users, a bunch of large federated rooms, bridges to other messengers ... And it just runs fine with 0 issues.
Are you talking about running a synapse server for like a thousand people or on absolute potato hardware or what is the issue ?
I'm not running a Synapse server myself so I can only speak on behalf of people I know who are. From what they told me they love the matrix protocol but it's not the same for the synapse implementation. A non-federated server can have somewhat great performance but a federated one was not worth it for them so they decided to switch to another alternative. They are not running for thousands of users more something like 40 I would say and while I don't know their server specs, I assume it's not a potato though.
Session is an Australian conpany afaik. The entire app reeks of entrapment. Australian laws are all about no privacy for you.
I think that SimpleX is more innovative and ground-breaking than Session.
But it's a difficult concept for the average person to not have an account, but everything is device oriented. Same problem with people not using gpg for email. Having to maintain a thing similar to a private key that's not memorizable like a username and password and back that up in case your device is lost. Is a big hurdle for many. And then additionally having to share a qr code or link through some external means for someone to connect with you rather than just telling them to download an app and enter your username HSS always been difficult.
So, IMHO, Signal has the best implementation possible with the level of usability that many nontechnical people expect in a chat application, even if it's not the most secure. I am interested to see how SimpleX solves these issues in the future, though.
Of course it is, that's the innovating part of it ! My opinion was that I rather use SimpleX if I wanted to switch away from Signal, if not I'll simply use Signal not Session. But my threat model isn't everyone's.
I think as people will be more educated on cryptography in there digital lives we will have better UX to the point of it not be as difficult as sending on e-mail in the late 80s. Innovation like Bitcoin, nostr, U2F, passkeys etc... will be more accessible over time. Today sending a message on Signal is infinity more easy, secure and private than the majority of e-mails of the 21th century.
Yeah, I just meant people are used to decades of using meaningful usernames. Having to use a cryptographic key has traditionally made it very difficult to get enough people to adopt to make it worth adopting yourself as a technologically savvy person. I never would have used Facebook in a million years if it wasn't for the fact that it was the only place I could get in touch with many people. Having to build your networks in-person is tedious for many people and sharing the codes securely through other means is cumbersome if you don't have an existing method for sharing.
Just like HTTPS needs several layers to make it work and still relies on an untrustworthy and corruptible thing like DNS to verify the destination and it's keys are the thing you're expecting to connect to. There's no secure way to share the route to your device electronically in a user-accountless system with no secure, trusted middleman translating names to addresses unless you do it in-person.
Use separate profile for different devices. Make a group when you chat with others.
Grr! Ok, but damned if I could get that to work! It seems like you can't use the desktop and mobile client at the same time! You have to scan a QR code to switch between them! And it has issues with firewalls and VPNs! Old and clueless here, maybe part of the problem. 🙁
No issues with fireballs and VPNs for me.
I didn't have an issue with fireballs either, thankfully, because I made my saving throws before they got to me.🔥😉
Yes SimpleX isn't mature from a UX perspective and that is due to it's innovative approach. If you need to have device sync and don't want Signal, Session could be a better optioon to you.
Am I right tho about having to scan QR codes to go back and forth between desktop and mobile on SimpleX, or am I just 😵💫?
I don't use SimpleX on my computers
Don't use Session! It's not secure with the recent changes!
There's nothing about Signal that requires savvines.
The bar is so low. I just had to visit somebody today to help them fix their computer. There was dirt on the fingerprint reader, and they forgot their password. I told them their password was their user name. I.e. hunter / hunter and it didn't work.... (I chose this because of their modest tech experience)
They were using hunter / Hunter instead.
Briar doesn't make sense to me because you're trading a central server for a central service... If tor is down, you can't message. It's the same POF as cellular, which is insane to me.
TOR isn't a centralized service, it's a distributed network.
It's also a specific procol, which can absolutely be blocked. I don't know where this notion that it's impossible to block tor because it was designed to be censorship resistant came from, but you can absolutely stop people from using it.
It's not even that hard and there's nothing end users can do about it if they don't know how to circumvent it...
Being able to be blocked is a completely different thing than being centralized service.
I mean, if users don't know how to circumvent something, by definition there is nothing that they can do about it.
However, unless this hypothetical censoring country is blocking all encrypted network traffic it is trivial to access TOR via a VPN or an SSH tunnel
Selfhosting is kind of hard and labor intensive for some of us; had a lot of trouble trying to set up NextCloud on my QNAP (if that counts as selfhosting), and finally gave up.
I used to think session is a way to go, but now..well simplex is literally all you need for communication with anyone
Not sure, I've never used session but I think less tech savvy people would want to use signal because it is similar to Whatsapp, which they are used to.
What do you think about OLVID?